Streaming TV Isn’t Just a New Way to Watch. It’s a New Genre.

At some point during Netflix’s “Sense8” — a gorgeous, ridiculous series about eight strangers scattered across the world who use a psychic connection to aid one another in fights and at one point have a virtual orgy — I had to ask myself: What am I watching?

I didn’t mean that the way I usually do when reviewing a baffling show. I meant what, in a definitional sense, was this maximalist, supersized, latticework story? A mini-series? A megamovie? To put it another way: Is Netflix TV?

On the one hand, sure. These days, when newspapers have video-production studios and you can watch “The Walking Dead” on your phone, “TV” is a pretty inclusive club. On the other hand, streaming shows — by which here I mean the original series that Netflix, Amazon and their ilk release all at once, in full seasons — are more than simply TV series as we’ve known them. They’re becoming a distinct genre all their own, whose conventions and aesthetics we’re just starting to figure out.

In TV, narrative has always been an outgrowth of the delivery mechanism. Why are there cliffhangers? So you’ll tune in next week. Why are shows a half-hour or an hour long? Because real-time viewing required predictable schedules. Why do episodes have a multiple-act structure? To leave room for the commercials.

HBO series like “Deadwood” — which jettisoned the ad breaks and content restrictions of network TV — have been compared to Dickens’s serial novels. Watching a streaming series is even more like reading a book — you receive it as a seamless whole, you set your own schedule — but it’s also like video gaming. Binge-watching is immersive. It’s user-directed. It creates a dynamic that I call “The Suck”: that narcotic, tidal feeling of getting drawn into a show and letting it wash over you for hours. “Play next episode” is the default, and it’s so easy. It can be competitive, even. Your friends are posting their progress, hour by hour, on social media. (“OMG #JessicaJones episode 10!! Woke up at 3 a.m. to watch!”) Each episode becomes a level to unlock.

With those new mechanics comes a new relationship with the audience. Traditional television — what the jargonmeisters now call “linear TV” — assumes that your time is scarce and it has you for a few precious hours before bed. The streaming services assume they own your free time, whenever it comes — travel, holidays, weekends — to fill with five- and 10-hour entertainments.

So they program shows exactly when TV networks don’t. They debut series on Fridays (considered “the death slot” in network TV) and over holidays. This November and December, TV’s long winter’s nap of reruns, the streaming services are unloading season after full season of original TV: “Jessica Jones,”“Transparent,” “Making a Murderer,” “The Art of More” — and more, and more. Amazon is releasing Season 2 of “Mozart in the Jungle” on Dec. 30, just in time for the ball to drop.

In other words, they schedule their shows like Hollywood movies. Streaming is like a vast multiplex where every screen is playing “The Mahabharata.” It expects commitment — and gets it.

Before Netflix and DVDs, there was an old-TV equivalent of the binge-watch: event network mini-series, like “Roots,” “Shogun” and “The Thorn Birds.” Where most TV of the time assumed you’d dip in and out of a series casually, these mammoth serials assumed they had your attention, all of it, until the story was done.

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Narcos (Netflix) This series about Pablo Escobar mixes historical footage with elements of a crime procedural, topping it off with as much voice-over as an audiobook.CreditDaniel Daza/Netflix

Just so, binge-watching assumes a different kind of transaction with the viewer. Weekly TV thrives by creating a constant state of tension, teasing you to come back next week. Streaming relies on The Suck.

Of course, no one’s stopping you from watching a series more slowly, but that changes the experience. Declaring whether it’s better or worse to binge fast or slow is like arguing whether it’s better to see the Grand Canyon from a helicopter or by foot. It’s beautiful either way, but it’s different. You see the fine grain, or you see the vast sweep.

When you watch a series weekly, the time you spend not watching — mulling, anticipating, just getting older — is a part of the show. “Breaking Bad,” for instance, is the story of a man’s descent, or rise, from ordinary life to murderous criminality. In narrative time, the story takes about two years. Watched live on AMC, it aired for more than five years. Binged — as many late-joining fans saw it — it took maybe a week or three.

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Transparent (Amazon) This is arguably TV’s most complex exploration of gender and sexuality, and it probably could not have been made for a network or cable service.CreditAmazon Studios

The live viewer saw Walter White’s change distended, in slow-motion; little by little, he broke badder and badder, in a way that emphasized the gradual slope of moral compromise. The binger saw him change in time-lapse, in a way that suggested that the tendency to arrogance and evil was in him all along. Neither perception is wrong. In fact, both themes are thoroughly built into the show. But how you watch, in some way, affects the story you see.

Streaming programmers are well aware of how The Suck works. According to Netflix data, most streaming viewers (including those watching original content and traditional TV shows) take three or four episodes to decide to commit to a season — meaning that streaming services can assume more patience (I’ll try just one more) than network programmers who assume the pilot is make-or-break.

In fact, Netflix’s chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, has said he considers the first season of a series, not the first episode, to be the “pilot.” So its premieres tend not to grab you so much as let you sink in. The first episode of “Narcos,” its drug-cartel drama, is an exposition-heavy scene-setter with as much voice-over as an audiobook; it’s less a pilot than a foreword.

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Mozart in the Jungle (Amazon) Part of the appeal of streaming services is the idea that a show can be about anything, even something like the world of classical music.CreditAli Goldstein/Amazon Studios, via Associated Press

This approach has advantages. With a few hours to seal the deal, you don’t need to load up your first episode with gimmicks, and you can avoid the tedious network practice of “repeating the pilot”: telling repetitive stories in the early episodes to accommodate latecomers. You can pack a series with story and incident and trust viewers not to forget details; “Orange Is the New Black,” for instance, has built out arcs for dozens of characters in a mere three seasons.

But it can also mean lethargic, shapeless narratives that rely on The Suck to keep viewers watching sheerly on the sunk-costs principle, like “Bloodline,” which drifted like flotsam in a Florida current until I gave up on it. (Don’t tell me: It gets good six or seven episodes in. There is always someone who will tell you that a Netflix series gets good six or seven episodes in. I have only so many more six-or-seven-hour stretches left in my life.)

Network TV shows, which produce new episodes while the seasons air, can course-correct midseason when ratings drop or a new character is rejected. The rise of online fan forums and social media made the dialogue even more intense (see the dissection of every episode of “Lost” when it aired). This could improve a show or encourage pandering, but it was, at least, a tool. Streaming series, each season handed down from the mountain on tablets, lose this tool entirely.

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Jessica Jones (Netflix) Marvel’s second streaming series after “Daredevil” follows a private investigator with superpowers. It’s even darker than “Narcos.”CreditMyles Aronowitz/Netflix

What Netflix does have is a tremendous amount of data on what people have already liked to watch. Do they like adventure drama? Make “Marco Polo.” Drug sagas like “Breaking Bad”? Give them “Narcos.” That’s probably excellent business, but it doesn’t encourage great leaps into the unknown.

That disparity fits the pattern of every new form of TV. “I Love Lucy” came decades before “Hill Street Blues,” “The Larry Sanders Show” before “The Sopranos.” Comedy is a portable medium — it jumped easily from radio to TV — and most of the better streaming comedies are similar to network and cable ones. (“Kimmy Schmidt” was developed for NBC, and “Catastrophe” first aired on British TV.) Most of the tweaks to the format (excepting the semi-successful, nonlinear “Arrested Development” season) have been simple and intuitive. “Master of None,” for instance, is both bluntly episodic and highly serial; it’s built for both bingeing and snacking.

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Master of None (Netflix) The modern age cripples us with options and diversions. Aziz Ansari takes that truth and spins it into a show both funny and moving.CreditK.C. Bailey/Netflix, via Associated Press

Serial drama, on the other hand, is potentially the most changed by bingeing — which means its creators have the most to learn about how to make it, and the audience, about how to watch.

So far, streaming has best served a certain kind of plot-heavy, competent-but-not-revolutionary drama. Once you accept that “House of Cards” is not the next “The Wire” but rather a live-action political cartoon about Evil Foghorn Leghorn, it’s perfectly fun: a boiling pot of Southern ham that will keep you good company on the iPad while you fold laundry.

The critic Alan Sepinwall, diagnosing this issue, argued recently that streaming series need to relearn the TV art of making tightly crafted episodes within larger serial arcs; “Your TV show,” he wrote, “doesn’t have to be a novel.” Streaming dramas aren’t novels. But they’re also not just TV shows as we’ve known them, delivered through a different pipe. And they won’t reach their full potential by simply imitating what already exists. The early days of broadcast gave us great shows, like “Playhouse 90,” that were essentially live theater that happened to be televised, but the medium didn’t come into its own until it learned to use what made it distinctive — the ability to tell open-ended ongoing stories. Likewise, streaming needs to learn to use its supersized format better, not fight against it.

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Other Space (Yahoo) The sci-fi parody, right, is one of the year’s offbeat pleasures.CreditYahoo

Which brings me back to “Sense8,” made by the filmmakers Andy and Lana Wachowski. Shot on locations around the world, it made the Wachowskis’ film “Cloud Atlas” look like a haiku, taking hours to lay out its premise and cutting balletically among the characters and their stories.

“Sense8” was by many traditional measures terrible — risible, laden with clumsy exposition and powered by high-THC we’re-all-connected hoo-hah. But it was also fearless and bracingly new, an effort by the Wachowskis to use every inch of the new format’s sprawling canvas. It was the R&D division of television, inviting you to don the crash suit and assume the risk.

And I’ll confess: As a critic with multiple TV commitments, I watched “Sense8” on and off over weeks, which means it’s entirely possible that I was simply doing it wrong. Maybe it required an immersive trance, like a psychedelic vision quest. Maybe the wide grazing necessary to being a generalist critic makes it impossible to properly appreciate this kind of show, made for the intense appreciation of specialists.

Conversely, streaming may not be the best format for every serial story. Matthew Weiner, the creator of the dense, deeply allusive “Mad Men,” has said that if he ever made a Netflix series, he’d argue for a weekly schedule to build in digestion time, and I’d sign the petition to let him. (Though that may also mean he’d be better off making the show for someone other than Netflix.)

More so than any recent innovation in TV, streaming has the potential, even the likelihood, to create an entirely new genre of narrative: one with elements of television, film and the novel, yet different from all of those. But it’s going to take time for all of us to master it.

Fortunately, you still have the rest of your holiday to work on it. I hope you didn’t make plans on New Year’s Eve.